From these sources now traced out by us--his youthfulness of spirit, his
mystical bias, and tendency to dream--symbolisms leading to disregard of
common feelings--flows too often the indeterminateness of Stevenson's
work, at the very points where for direct interest there should be
decision. In _The Master of Ballantrae_ this leads him to try to bring
the balances even as regards our interest in the two brothers, in so far
justifying from one point of view what Mr Zangwill said in the quotation
we have given, or, as Sir Leslie Stephen had it in his second series of
the _Studies of a Biographer_:
"The younger brother in _The Master of Ballantrae_, who is
black-mailed by the utterly reprobate master, ought surely to be
interesting instead of being simply sullen and dogged. In the later
adventures, we are invited to forgive him on the ground that his brain
has been affected: but the impression upon me is that he is sacrificed
throughout to the interests of the story [or more strictly for the
working out of the problem as originally conceived by the author]. The
curious exclusion of women is natural in the purely boyish stories,
since to a boy woman is simply an incumbrance upon reasonable modes of
life. When in _Catriona_ Stevenson introduces a love story, it is
still unsatisfactory, because David Balfour is so much the undeveloped
animal that his passion is clumsy, and his charm for the girl
unintelligible. I cannot feel, to say the truth, that in any of these
stories I am really among living human beings with whom, apart from
their adventures, I can feel any very lively affection or antipathy."
In the _Ebb-Tide_ it is, in this respect, yet worse: the three heroes
choke each other off all too literally.
In his excess of impartiality he tones down the points and lines that
would give the attraction of true individuality to his characters, and
instead, would fain have us contented with his liberal, and even over-
sympathetic views of them and allowances for them. But instead of thus
furthering his object, he sacrifices the whole--and his story becomes,
instead of a broad and faithful human record, really a curiosity of
autobiographic perversion, and of overweening, if not extravagant egotism
of the more refined, but yet over-obtrusive kind.
Mr Baildon thus hits the subjective tendency, out of which mainly this
defect--a serious defect in view of interest--arises.
"That we can none of us be sure to what crime we might not descend, if
only our temptation were sufficiently acute, lies at the root of his
fondness and toleration for wrong-doers (p. 74).
Thus he practically declines to do for us what we are unwilling or unable
to do for ourselves. Interest in two characters in fiction can never, in
this artificial way, and if they are real characters truly conceived, be
made equal, nor can one element of claim be balanced against another,
even at the beck of the greatest artist. The common sentiment, as we
have seen, resents it even as it resents lack of guidance elsewhere.
After all, the novelist is bound to give guidance: he is an authority in
his own world, where he is an autocrat indeed; and can work out issues as
he pleases, even as the Pope is an authority in the Roman Catholic world:
he abdicates his functions when he declines to lead: we depend on him
from the human point of view to guide us right, according to the heart,
if not according to any conventional notion or opinion. Stevenson's
pause in individual presentation in the desire now to raise our sympathy
for the one, and then for the other in _The Master of Ballantrae_, admits
us too far into Stevenson's secret or trick of affected self-withdrawal
in order to work his problem and to signify his theories, to the loss and
utter confusion of his aims from the point of common dramatic and human
interest. It is the same in _Catriona_ in much of the treatment of James
Mohr or More; it is still more so in not a little of the treatment of
_Weir of Hermiston_ and his son, though there, happily for him and for
us, there were the direct restrictions of known fact and history, and
clearly an attempt at a truer and broader human conception unburdened by
theory or egotistic conception.
Everywhere the problem due to the desire to be overjust, so to say,
emerges; and exactly in the measure it does so the source of true
dramatic directness and variety is lost. It is just as though
Shakespeare were to invent a chorus to cry out at intervals about Iago--"a
villain, bad lot, you see, still there's a great deal to be said for
him--victim of inheritance, this, that and the other; and considering
everything how could you really expect anything else now." Thackeray was
often weak from this same tendency--he meant Becky Sharp to be largely
excused by the reader on these grounds, as he tries to excuse several
others of his characters; but his endeavours in this way to gloss over
"wickedness" in a way, do not succeed--the reader does not carry clear in
mind as he goes along, the suggestions Thackeray has ineffectually set
out and the "healthy hatred of scoundrels" Carlyle talked about has its
full play in spite of Thackeray's suggested excuses and palliations, and
all in his own favour, too, as a story-wright.
Stevenson's constant habit of putting himself in the place of another,
and asking himself how would I have borne myself here or there, thus
limited his field of dramatic interest, where the subject should have
been made pre-eminently in aid of this effect. Even in Long John Silver
we see it, as in various others of his characters, though there, owing to
the demand for adventure, and action contributory to it, the defect is
not so emphasised. The sense as of a projection of certain features of
the writer into all and sundry of his important characters, thus imparts,
if not an air of egotism, then most certainly a somewhat constrained, if
not somewhat artificial, autobiographical air--in the very midst of
action, questions of ethical or casuistical character arise, all
contributing to submerging individual character and its dramatic
interests under a wave of but half-disguised autobiography. Let
Stevenson do his very best--let him adopt all the artificial disguises he
may, as writing narrative in the first person, etc., as in _Kidnapped_
and _Catriona_, nevertheless, the attentive reader's mind is constantly
called off to the man who is actually writing the story. It is as
though, after all, all the artistic or artificial disguises were a mere
mask, as more than once Thackeray represented himself, the mask partially
moved aside, just enough to show a chubby, childish kind of transformed
Thackeray face below. This belongs, after all, to the order of
self-revelation though under many disguises: it is creation only in its
manner of work, not in its essential being--the spirit does not so to us
go clean forth of itself, it stops at home, and, as if from a remote and
shadowy cave or recess, projects its own colour on all on which it looks.
This is essentially the character of the _mystic_; and hence the
justification for this word as applied expressly to Stevenson by Mr
Chesterton and others.
"The inner life like rings of light
Goes forth of us, transfiguring all we see."
The effect of these early days, with the peculiar tint due to the
questionings raised by religious stress and strain, persists with
Stevenson; he grows, but he never escapes from that peculiar something
which tells of childish influences--of boyish perversions and troubled
self-examinations due to Shorter Catechism--any one who would view
Stevenson without thought of this, would view him only from the
outside--see him merely in dress and outer oddities. Here I see definite
and clear heredity. Much as he differed from his worthy father in many
things, he was like him in this--the old man like the son, bore on him
the marks of early excesses of wistful self-questionings and painful
wrestlings with religious problems, that perpetuated themselves in a
quaint kind of self-revelation often masked by an assumed self-withdrawal
or indifference which to the keen eye only the more revealed the real
case. Stevenson never, any more than his father, ceased to be interested
in the religious questions for which Scotland has always had a
_penchant_--and so much is this the case that I could wish Professor
Sidney Colvin would even yet attempt to show the bearing of certain
things in that _Address to the Scottish Clergy_ written when Stevenson
was yet but a young man, on all that he afterwards said and did. It
starts in the _Edinburgh Edition_ without any note, comment, or
explanation whatever, but in that respect the _Edinburgh Edition_ is not
quite so complete as it might have been made. In view of the point now
before us, it is far more important than many of the other trifles there
given, and wants explanation and its relation to much in the novels
brought out and illustrated. Were this adequately done, only new ground
would be got for holding that Stevenson, instead of, as has been said,
"seeing only the visible world," was, in truth, a mystical moralist, once
and always, whose thoughts ran all too easily into parable and fable, and
who, indeed, never escaped wholly from that atmosphere, even when writing
of things and characters that seemed of themselves to be wholly outside
that sphere. This was the tendency, indeed, that militated against the
complete detachment in his case from moral problems and mystical thought,
so as to enable him to paint, as it were, with a free hand exactly as he
saw; and most certainly not that he saw only the visible world. The
mystical element is not directly favourable to creative art. You see in
Tolstoy how it arrests and perplexes--how it lays a disturbing check on
real presentation--hindering the action, and is not favourable to the
loving and faithful representation, which, as Goethe said, all true and
high art should be. To some extent you see exactly the same thing in
Nathaniel Hawthorne as in Tolstoy. Hawthorne's preoccupations in this
way militated against his character-power; his healthy characters who
would never have been influenced as he describes by morbid ones yet are
not only influenced according to him, but suffer sadly. Phoebe Pyncheon
in _The House of the Seven Gables_, gives sunshine to poor Hepzibah
Clifford, but is herself never merry again, though joyousness was her
natural element. So, doubtless, it would have been with Pansie in
_Doctor Dolliver_, as indeed it was with Zenobia and with the hero in the
_Marble Faun_. "We all go wrong," said Hawthorne, "by a too strenuous
resolution to go right." Lady Byron was to him an intolerably
irreproachable person, just as Stevenson felt a little of the same
towards Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was the "sunnily-ascetic," the
asceticism and its corollary, as he puts it: the passion for individual
self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson. This is the position
of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man who sees only the
visible world.
Mr Baildon says:
"Stevenson has many of the things that are wanting or defective in
Scott. He has his philosophy of life; he is beyond remedy a moralist,
even when his morality is of the kind which he happily calls 'tail
foremost,' or as we may say, inverted morality. Stevenson is, in
fact, much more of a thinker than Scott, and he is also much more of
the conscious artist, questionable advantage as that sometimes is. He
has also a much cleverer, acuter mind than Scott, also a questionable
advantage, as genius has no greater enemy than cleverness, and there
is really no greater descent than to fall from the style of genius to
that of cleverness. But Stevenson was too critical and alive to
misuse his cleverness, and it is generally employed with great effect
as in the diabolical ingenuities of a John Silver, or a Master of
Ballantrae. In one sense Stevenson does not even belong to the school
of Scott, but rather to that of Poe, Hawthorne, and the Brontes, in
that he aims more at concentration and intensity, than at the easy,
quiet breadth of Scott."
If, indeed, it should not here have been added that Stevenson's theory of
life and conduct was not seldom too insistent for free creativeness, for
dramatic freedom, breadth and reality.
Now here I humbly think Mr Baldion errs about the cleverness when he
criticises Stevenson for the _faux pas_ artistically of resorting to the
piratic filibustering and the treasure-seeking at the close of _The
Master of Ballantrae_, he only tells and tells plainly how cleverness
took the place of genius there; as indeed it did in not a few
cases--certainly in some points in the Dutch escapade in _Catriona_ and
in not a few in _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_. The fault of that last story is
simply that we seem to hear Stevenson chuckling to himself, "Ah, now,
won't they all say at last how clever I am." That too mars the _Merry
Men_, whoever wrote them or part wrote them, and _Prince Otto_ would have
been irretrievably spoiled by this self-conscious sense of cleverness had
it not been for style and artifice. In this incessant "see how clever I
am," we have another proof of the abounding youthfulness of R. L.
Stevenson. If, as Mr Baildon says (p. 30), he had true child's horror of
being put in fine clothes in which one must sit still and be good,
_Prince Otto_ remains attractive in spite of some things and because of
his fine clothes. Neither Poe nor Hawthorne could have fallen to the
piracy, and treasure-hunting of _The Master of Ballantrae_.
"Far behind Scott in the power of instinctive, irreflective, spontaneous
creation of character, Stevenson tells his story with more art and with a
firmer grip on his reader." And that is exactly what I, wishing to do
all I dutifully can for Stevenson, cannot see. His genius is in nearly
all cases pulled up or spoiled by his all too conscious cleverness, and
at last we say, "Oh Heavens! if he could and would but let himself go or
forget himself what he might achieve." But he doesn't--never does, and
therefore remains but a second-rate creator though more and more the
stylist and the artist. This is more especially the case at the very
points where writers like Scott would have risen and roused all the
readers' interest. When Stevenson reaches such points, he is always as
though saying "See now how cleverly I'll clear that old and stereotyped
style of thing and do something _new_." But there are things in life and
human nature, which though they are old are yet ever new, and the true
greatness of a writer can never come from evading or looking askance at
them or trying to make them out something else than what they really are.
No artistic aim or ambition can suffice to stand instead of them or to
refine them away. That way lies only cold artifice and frigid lacework,
and sometimes Stevenson did go a little too much on this line.